CDN is a network of web servers that supply cached content from sites to individuals based on the geographical place of the individual.

You might not realize it, but the geographical distance between you and a web server can play a large part in determining how long it takes for you (and your visitors) to connect to your site.

The bigger the distance, the longer the wait. Especially for websites that are particularly resource intensive.

WordPress CDN Solution

If you’re storing all of your files that go together with your website on just one server, visitors accessing your site from the other side of the world could potentially end up spending a significant amount of time waiting for those files to load.

A CDN gets around this problem by storing your website on servers in multiple locations.

When someone tries to access your website, they will be connected to the server that’s geographically closest to them.

This can substantially improve load times resulting in happier visitors and higher rankings.

I will only mention CDNs which are free or at least have a free plan (at the date of writing this).

On average, websites using Incapsula’s CDN are 50% faster and consume 40%-70% less bandwidth, according to the company’s website.

The service provides an excellent monitoring dashboard so you can check the effect of caching on your website’s performance.

There’s also an API for companies that want to control caching policies and change things like caching modes, create custom caching rules, purge the cache, purge a particular cache, or configure content optimization settings.

If you’re looking for a free CDN service that rivals CloudFlare, be sure to check out Incapsula.

A free plan with Incapsula includes the use of a CDN and optimization service, plus bot mitigation and two-factor authentication.

To further speed up your website, Incapsula also supports content optimization. This includes minifying your website and compressing images to ensure a smaller file size.

Premium plans start from $59/month, which also includes advanced performance, a web-app firewall, PCI compliance, and SSL support. A 14-day free trial is also available.

Paid CDN Options for WordPress

#1 MAXCDN – MaxCDN present themselves as the experts in content delivery networks. They’re one of the most well-known names in the field.

They have a large number of server locations that distributed across the US, South America Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Customer dashboard is easy to navigate, and you get an enormous amount of control over how your website content is hosted. This includes a content provision, purge controls, usage reports, and content caching settings.

If your site gets little traffic, it might not be worth signing up for a premium CDN. A free service, such as Photon by Jetpack or CloudFlare’s free service will suffice.

When you are delivering about 500GB per month of traffic, it makes sense to offload those hits to a CDN.

If you provide videos, podcasts, music, large images, and software downloads, a CDN will ensure your visitors can access your media quickly.

2. Network Performance – Where are your users located? How many servers do you expect a CDN to have, and where?

If the majority of visitors to your site is based in the US, it makes sense to go with a CDN with servers spread across that region.

However, if you have a range of visitors from across the US, Europe, and Asia, it would be better for your content to be available on servers in those regions.

It’s also important to note whether a CDN offers a push or pull service. A push CDN works very much like a secondary server. The user uploads content directly to the CDN (automatically or manually) and links to it.

With a pull CDN, the site owner leaves the content on their server and rewrites their URLs to point to the CDN. When asked for a particular file, the CDN will first go to the original server, pull the file and serve it. The CDN then caches that file until it expires.

3. Technology – Do you require streaming downloads, such as video, audio or software downloads? Do you run a gaming website?

There are vast differences in cost from one CDN to the next, and plans differ from pay-as-you-go to monthly accounts with set features.

The price you pay will depend on the CDN plan that best meets your needs and how much traffic lands on your site.

Many CDNs offer free trial periods so if you’re interested in trying out a CDN you’ve got nothing to lose.

What is the Best CDN for WordPress Multisite?

While many services support WordPress, the lines blur when it comes to Multisite.

Services like MaxCDN, CloudFlare, and Rackspace, can be integrated with WordPress using W3 Total Cache, but the caching plugin still doesn’t fully support Multisite (you can use it on sub-sites and the main site, but not an entire network).

Here is quick guide from one user who managed to get it working with CloudFlare:

To use a WPMU site configuration with CloudFlare, do the following:

1. Add the root domain to CloudFlare (yourdomain.com) and point the DNS to CloudFlare, using the CloudFlare nameservers specified during the signup process and making the DNS change at your registrar.

2. Define the wildcard subdomains in your DNS zone file during the signup process. CloudFlare cannot proxy wildcard DNS entries, so to benefit from CloudFlare performance and security, you must explicitly define any entries in your zone file as either CNAMEs or A record entries.

HTTP/2 is the latest evolution of the HTTP protocol, which offers significant improvements to website load speeds and responsiveness.

Data Centers

Origin-Pull

Push (upload to CDN servers)

Purge/Purge all

Gzip

Honors all origin server headers

Can override origin server headers

Set caching headers for pushed files

Custom CNAMEs

HTTPS

Hotlink Protection

Live chat

Free backups

Integration with WordPress

Price

Incapsula

Always-on

30

Resend from origin, or compress on edge

Shared certificate is free on all except free plan.

Shared certificate is free on all except free plan.

Integrates independently of WordPress. You need to change DNS settings. You will get all instructions in email and on Incapsula dashboard.

Free and paid plans

A free plan includes bot protection, access control, login protect, CDN and Optimizer, website analytics, and community support.
A paid PRO plan starts at $59 per month and includes the same features as the free plan, plus SSL support, advanced performance and email support.

Incapsula is more than CDN. It offers various tools for website security and performance. Like Web application firewall, SSL support, Backdoor protection, Custom security rules etc.

I am not familiar what settings you need to make in order to integrate Akamai CDN with website

To get pricing for Akamai's products you need to contact them.

The most popular CDN on the market right now, used by the biggest websites. Apart from CDN, Akamai also offers a whole range of website performance tools, with every plan being custom-built on a per-client basis.

NOTE: In time of writing some CDN providers did not provide data for comparison so I had to fill by checking their knowledge base which lacks of all info mentioned in comparison table. Data provided may be correct or false.

WordPress CDN Service Final Words

Using a CDN is a good step in the right direction to solving the issue of geographical distance between user and server.

By connecting to the server closest to them, valuable seconds are shaved off your load times.

In today’s world where the average Internet speed of technologically advanced regions exceeds 10 Mbps, it’s no wonder that CDN services thrive.

Where once websites were delivered from a single server, CDNs have revolutionized how online content is delivered.

If you run a small to a medium-sized site (around 40,000 to 50,000 page views), CloudFlare is a reliable option for your needs.

Their free plan makes it a great alternative to just get started with the concept of CDNs and speed up your site with minimal effort.

From there, you can either let CloudFlare grow with you – by switching to one of the paid plans – or move your business elsewhere.

Services such as Amazon CloudFront, Akamai are better suited to enterprise level sites and are overkill for sites with minimal traffic.

For small sites, CloudFlare is a great option since it is free and smaller sites don’t spend too many resources.

Sites offering streaming media, such as video, audio, and gaming, should check out paid CDN plans which are tailored for this kind of service.

For WordPress sites that already attract a nice chunk of traffic every day, I’d recommend KeyCDN, cdnSUN, MaxCDN or Incapsula. The configuration possibilities of the networks are really good, and it’s quite affordable all the way up (as your bandwidth grows).

Alternatively, if the core of your audience is located in a single geographical location, I’d probably go for a CDN that has the most servers in that area, even if that means your country’s local CDN network, which might not be that popular world-wide.

Let’s keep in mind that delivering your website to your core audience is the most important thing here. You won’t get much use of a CDN that has the best global coverage if your visitors are from just a single country where that network might have no servers.

For this site, I use Incapsula Pro plan as it provides me with security features as well as CDN. For my smaller sites I use CDNsun and for sites that I have just started CloudFlare is a must have tool.

Now over to you my dear reader. Tell me which CDN service do you use for your WordPress website needs?

About Article Author

Kasa

I love making websites, especially in WordPress. Hope reading content on this website you will find helpful tips, tutorials, comparisons, and product reviews which will help improve your site and skyrocket your business.

​Page loading is mandatory for any website, and it is now an official search engine ranking factor, and if your pages are not loading less than 3 seconds, you need to work on it right away.

Although websites used to rely on a single server for presenting all the content, and CDN services have improved the scenario forever. By using a reputable CDN service, you can make sure that the readers are experiencing a faster page loading speed plus a better-performing website. It is possible to use the primary CDN service for free in private blogs or simplistic websites. But, if you want to improve security components, you have to go for the value added packages.

Thanks for sharing the information, I am using CDN on my recently started WordPress powered website; now my website is really fast loading after CDN integration, but your post encourages me to think more about premium features that are required for security concerns.​